 Co-dependency is a situation in which two or more people or groups, through their social interaction, exhibit and sustain among each other behaviours that are mutually- and self-reinforcing and arguably unhealthy. Generally speaking one party suffers from some kind of pathology, and the co-dependent, through indulging, denying, encouraging or ignoring this pathology, makes it worse and enables it to continue, and draws him- or herself perversely into anti-social behaviour, often even drawing strength from the power they have over the ill person as a result.
The US NMHA site on the subject limits the definition to family situation involving addiction, abuse or severe physical or mental illness, diagnoses the ‘illness’ as chronic and perhaps even progressive, and is filled with psychobabble, suggesting for example that healthy people who didn’t suffer some kind of childhood trauma almost never become co-dependent. Most other resources on the subject, including self-help books, life-long 12-step ‘recovery’ programs, and various schools of psychology, reinforce this concept, which critics say “pathologizes the natural tendency to care for others, and mandates action which is not necessarily in line with prosocial values…Those desiring help who find the mentality of [12-step programs] irrelevant or offensive are deemed ‘in denial’ or ‘into their disease’.” You won’t be surprised, I suspect, that I’m on the side of the critics. Let’s start with definitions, which for me means going back to word origins. The word literally means “hanging on with”. You can almost picture two people suspended from a rope on either side of a tree branch over a precipice — if one lets go, both will fall. But if they both just mutually hang on, and don’t do anything else, their situation will not improve and will ultimately get worse. I like this definition because it’s free of moral judgement, blame, and the assigning of labels of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. It merely acknowledges that both parties are in a difficult and possibly very unhealthy situation. The answer for our tree-hangers is pretty obvious: get help from someone else. Not help to ‘visualize the situation in a more positive light’, or to extract the ‘innocent’ party alone — help to extract both parties from their predicament simultaneously. Co-dependency, I think, is not so much a ‘disease’ as a problem, and a consequence, of isolation. We get wound up in others in ways that can get us into trouble when there’s no one else around to give us perspective, to spell us and give us a break, and to help us (and the person caught with us) climb back up. I think the isolated modern nuclear family is the real ’cause’ of most co-dependency. When we lived in open communities, engendered and simultaneously carried on many deep emotional relationships, we were much less likely to get caught in the trap of depending on some one else for our survival, or our sense of self-worth. It takes a village to escape the trap. In our modern world, too, co-dependency is not limited to families. Entire nations have become co-dependent. The US, for example, has economic co-dependency relationships with at least three countries: China, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia. Each of these countries is “hanging on with” the US for markets and/or weaponry, and when the US dollar collapses all three countries will fall quickly with the US. China is trying to end its isolated dependency on US purchasing through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, but there is a danger that it may be forced to choose between co-dependency with the US or co-dependency with the SCO (co-dependents tend to be very jealous of others threatening their hegemony of attention). Canada, likewise, is co-dependent on the US, its partner for 70% of its trade and owner of 70% of its resources. Its right-wing minority government is in classic co-dependent denial, urging even more economic and political integration with the US. Canadian conservatives have been isolated from the progressive Canadian mainstream for generations, so they were ripe for co-dependency with their US counterparts. There is also a co-dependency between the Bush Administration and the die-hard neoconservatives in the US. Nothing else but a sense of complete and pathological isolation from the rest of the world could account for Bush’s pandering to religious and political extremists who clearly do not share many of his values, or for the neocons’ forgiveness of Bush’s staggeringly incompetent administration and their willingness to believe even his most preposterous Orwellian lies and encroachments on their civil freedoms. Perhaps most importantly, most of the citizens of the civilized world are co-dependent with the wealth and power elite that is driving our unsustainable civilization over a cliff. We are desperate to believe the deceptions of our co-dependent — that global warming is a myth, that technology will solve the end of oil and all our other problems, that there is no other way to live. To admit to ourselves that we are hanging there by a rope over a deadly precipice, and the people who got us there are hanging onto the other end, depending on our willingness to keep buying, borrowing, praying and believing that Rapture or Hydrogen Cells or Space Travel or Cryogenics or some other deus ex machina will save us all, is just too much for us to accept. As the 12-step groups will tell you, the first step is admitting you have a problem. The second step is reaching out for help, but not to experts with panaceas and lies and promises (and their hands on the other end of the rope). We need to pull ourselves up, hand over hand, until we can reach the outstretched hands, hands that we can’t quite yet see, of people who know and offer a better way to live, and then walk away from our co-dependency. The corporatists on the other end of the rope are unlikely to follow, even if they see us starting to break free. That is their problem. For all these unhealthy relationships, there is only one way out: Ending the isolation, from the rest of the world, from alternative ideas on how to make the world a better place, and ultimately, from the truth. For now, it is still easier, and more comforting, to believe that magical rescue is on the way, or that this is all a dream, or that we still have time to do something later. Only once we realize we have no other choice, will we start the terrifying climb out of our co-dependency. In the end, after all, we dowhat we must. |
August 31, 2006
Co-Dependency
BlogDay 2006
 Today is BlogDay 2006, a day in which bloggers are encouraged to take note of and recognize exceptional bloggers around the world, especially those who blog in languages other than our own. This has been quite a success in the non-Anglophone world in recent years, but sadly, since most English-speaking bloggers have a plethora of blogs to choose from, and are unlikely to speak another language anyway, their participation in this annual event is pretty muted. I speak French, but spend too little time browsing Francophone blogs.
But together we can at least publicize and celebrate this event. Although the official BlogDay site is groaning under all today’s activity, please keep trying until you get through, learn what BlogDay is all about, and then collectively in the comments thread let’s nominate 5 exceptional blogs that are (a) from non-Anglophone countries and (b) not primarily written in English. Please post a link to the blog(s) you nominate using the <ahref=”"></a> HTML tag (with the full URL between the quotes). And to the organizers of this event, bravo/brava, merci beaucoup! |
August 30, 2006
Self-Experimentation Update (Continued): The Hundred-Year Lie, A Stress Management Program, and Questions on Probiotics
 This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, which I thought was more than long enough as it was. The Hundred-Year Lie But the book was also enormously disappointing — after promising it wouldn’t scare-monger, it does exactly that, and leaves the reader with next to no ideas on how to compensate for and cope with the damage these industries are doing to us. The best feature of the book is the vast amount of data that it contains, and its thorough refutations of the common myths that our health and longevity are actually improving because of modern foods and drugs, and that reported incidents of spikes in previously-rare diseases are only due to better measurement and reporting mechanisms. We really are living in an era of epidemic diseases, caused by these three industries, diseases for which there are, in most cases, no cures. And we face huge denial, massive and powerful resistance from the rich and powerful industrial lobbies, and huge costs if we want to reform these industries so they stop killing us. Fitzgerald analyzes the entire food supply chain to explain how the multiplier effect of modern malnutrition and exposure to toxics works to impoverish and poison what we eat:
I’ve tried to capture all this in the diagram above. The problem is, we can’t rely on government or government agencies, the medical profession, industry or science (which relies heavily on industry grants and sponsorships) to warn us, or to take any meaningful steps to fix the system. The FDA and EPA have no capacity to test or demand information, very limited authority and resources to take legal or other action, a desperate shortage of inspectors and staff, and indifference and even animosity from anti-regulation governments put in power by donations from these industries. Government can’t protect us. The medical profession and Big Pharma profit from our illness. A medical journal study showed that half of all drug advertising and drug information supplied to doctors is so misleading as to encourage mis-prescription and over-prescription of these drugs. Industry cares about profit, not people’s health. And science does and says what the people who dole out money to them tell them to. It’s up to us to protect ourselves. Even the NIH admits to its helplessness: We’re struggling to look at where genetics and the environment interact in the human cell, causing a molecule to change that starts a kind of chain reaction leading to disease. Scientists liken the changes to a cascade — a series of ever-larger waterfalls of cellular changes — that may lead to cancer, Parkinsons’, arthritis, heart disease or other diseases. Though we still do not understand the root causes of many of these serious chronic diseases, we suspect they can be caused or triggered by chemicals and other environmental exposures, even from years before.
Last year the US Government Accountability Office cited the EPA for abject failure to protect people from tens of thousands of toxic chemicals. But they have no authority to rectify the problem. The EPA relies totally on tests provided by industry itself, and even those biased test results have only been forthcoming for 15% of the chemicals industry has introduced in the last generation. Fitzgerald criticizes industry and policy-makers for trying to find and push “silver bullet” solutions to health problems instead of looking at programs that combine natural and common-sense actions holistically. But when he finally proffers solutions at the end of the book, they too are of the ’silver bullet’ variety: Eat “pure foods” and “no synthetics” he says. Go to a detox centre like the Hippocrates Health Centre. Eat wheatgrass and green algae. Fast every second day. Sweat in a “far infrared” sauna. Get your colon cleansed regularly. Some dubious (and recently-challenged by independent sources like Consumers Union) claims for a few popular herbs are also trotted out. Aw, come on, Randall, surely you can do better than that. Nevertheless, The Hundred-Year Lie is a useful resource to add to your library, if only to understand how the multiplier effect works to ruin our health and to deal with the pervasive myths and naysayers. A Stress Management Program As I explained yesterday, so far my body seems to have taken charge of managing my stress level, to the point I feel less stressed than I have at any time in my life. But some of this may be due to the combined effects of drugs, insomnia, fatigue, and anemia, so I don’t want to count on it continuing. Part of Phase 2 of my self-experimentation program will be conscious stress reduction and stress management activities, geared towards strengthening the four stress coping capacities mentioned in yesterday’s research: Perspective (dispassion in the face of stress), Let-Self-Changeability (developing resilience), Outlets (to discharge stress), and Acceptance (of what you cannot control/change). There is a mind-boggling amount of material on the Internet about this subject, but most of it is just common sense. Some of the ideas out there are ludicrous, and some obvious ways to cope with stress are not mentioned at all. I’ve developed the following stress management program, which I hope will supplement and sustain the ten stress-reducing changes I wrote about yesterday that my body has already had the good sense to impose on me: Perspective and Acceptance Capacity-Building Activities:
Let-Self-Change Activities:
Outlets:
I’d love to know what you think is missing from this program. I also need to develop measures for each of these, so I can track progress. Questions on Probiotics: The idea of probiotics is to replenish the natural ‘flora’ of bacteria and enzymes that take the good stuff out of what you digest and neutralize the bad stuff. The problem is that the natural flora are infinitely varied, while probiotics, whether taken in yogurt or in nutritional supplements, tend to me one or a few specific varieties. There is some evidence that probiotics act only as a temporary working substitute for natural flora, until the latter can replenish themselves, rather than actually replenishing the flora, but that’s OK. The most common probiotic types are lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. The current fad product, Activia yogurt from Danone (Dannon in the US), contains a type of bifidobacterium that supposedly speeds passage through the large intestine, which I guess is important for those who suffer from ‘irregularity’ and don’t want to take high-fibre products like psyllium seeds (aka Metamucil). There’s yet another commercial probiotic called saccharomyces boulardii, prescibed as an anti-diarrheal (the opposite effect of Activia). Another problem with probiotics is the lack of standards: In many products tested recently by the CBC, most of the bacteria were already dead at time of purchase, or died quickly thereafter. Quantities of bacteria promised and delivered per dose are all over the map. There’s even some evidence that most probiotics never make it through the digestive tract (the stomach especially) to the place where they do their magic. The clinical and empirical evidence for the value of probiotics seems impressive, and I’ve already made them part of my regimen, but I’m not sure it’s doing me any good. Anyone out there suggest some good, credible readings on the subject, or have stories, good or bad, about your use of probiotics? I’d love tohear them. OK, I’m done. I promise, no more about self-experimentation for awhile. Tomorrow, some musings on co-dependency. |
August 29, 2006
Self-Experimentation Update: Science vs Instinct, and The Stress Factor
 As regular readers know, I have embarked on a self-experimentation program to discover (I) an optimal therapy regime, (II) an optimal flare-up prevention program, and ultimately (III) the cause of and (IV) the cure for my new affliction, ulcerative colitis.
To do this, I have started testing a hypothesis that ulcerative colitis (and perhaps all auto-immune hyperactivity and deficiency diseases — AIHDs and AIDDs) are actually caused by a combination of
I would not argue with the overwhelming amount of data that suggests that stress is the catalyst, in the presence of these three causes, that actually precipitates the symptoms of AIHDs and AIDDs. Stress management therefore needs to be part of the therapy regime and flare-up prevention program once you get these chronic diseases (my goals I and II above), but is unlikely to be productive in discovering the cause or cure for them (my goals III and IV above). Science vs Instinct: Self-Experimentation Philosophy and Methodology I had a long conversation with Seth Roberts, the self-experimentation guru, yesterday. While he put it very gently, he clearly has some concerns with my program. For a start, he thinks I have far too many variables in play at one time to be able to accurately determine which treatments and circumstances are working to alleviate or exacerbate the symptoms of my ulcerative colitis. Some of the people on his self-experimentation forum have recommended techniques like principal component analysis to add discipline to my tracking and the mass of data I am compiling. But I’m not so sure that this kind of rigour is either possible or necessary in dealing with a system as complex as the digestive system (or any ecological or social system, for that matter). Seth used these techniques to hone in on his Shangri-La diet formula, and treatments for his insomnia and acne. He changed the variables one at a time and measured the results with as much precision as possible. But his real genius is his combination of great imagination and a deep understanding of human nature and human evolution. For three million years our bodies have slowly adapted to changes in environment, diet and human activity. But they just can’t accommodate the breakneck pace of change required by and imposed on them by modern human culture — changes like processed foods, a sedentary lifestyle, psychological stresses etc. We need somehow to adapt our modern behaviours to give our bodies a break, to help them figure out what to do by reference to what they’ve done for those three million years. Seth successfully hypothesized, for example, that since we spent an average of ten hours a day on our feet for most of our human evolution, one way to treat insomnia might be to work standing up at a desk all day instead of sitting down. Once he had that stroke of genius, he then used rigorous scientific and statistical techniques to test the ‘work standing up’ hypothesis and hone the optimal standing-up behaviour. But it’s his imagination and understanding of how we evolved and behaved in prehistoric times that gave him this brilliant hypothesis to test in the first place. I guess what I’m admitting is that I trust my instincts, that coming up with plausible, imaginative hypotheses is more important than trying to impose a great deal of scientific or statistical precision to testing them, and that an unrigorous self-experimentation program that seems to work and intuitively ‘makes sense’ is good enough. Maybe that betrays my impatience or lack of attention to detail. But, in my case, if I:
Am I letting the world down by not subjecting my intuitive sense of what’s working to more scientific and statistical verification? Maybe, but I’m just one person, and we’re all different. If all of us self-experimenters just shared our stories, our imaginative hypotheses, and our instinctive feelings, and leave others to interpret and use them in their own personal context, I wonder if that might not be more valuable for our collective health than a ton of scientific data about what worked precisely and unarguably for one person? After all, to test the hypothesis above (that ‘modern malnutrition’, toxin overexposure and musculo-skeletal distress together damage our immune system) I first need some objective, quantitative measure of how many micronutrients and probiotics I’m consuming (and missing out on), how many are making it through my gastrointestinal tract to the place where each does its particular magic, how healthy my probiotic ‘flora’ are that process the micronutrients, how much of which toxins I have in my body, and how healthy my musculo-skeletal system (posture, tone, rigidity etc.) is. And then I need to monitor and correlate these things versus the health (i.e. balanced, hyperactive or suppressed) of my immune system (itself hugely complex). This is a herculean task — a huge number of measures that required instrumentation not available to me (or maybe to anyone — medical understanding of GI and immune system function is still medieval). So how can I hope to find the causes and cures of this disease? I guess the truth is that I am already persuaded — instinctively and because it just ‘makes sense’ — that modern malnutrition, toxic exposure and chronic musculo-skeletal distress are not good for us; that they are all modern phenomena that correlate strongly with the current epidemic of AIHDs and IADDs; that these potential causes were apparently absent in gatherer-hunter cultures that had low incidences of such diseases and are apparently absent in modern cultures (Japan, Greenland) that have low incidences of these diseases today; and that therefore, as long as science and medicine are unable to come up with any other credible causes, my hypothesis is very likely to be correct. If so, what we need are programs — changes to our execrable profit-not-health-driven food system (more on this tomorrow), zero tolerance and use of the precautionary principle when it comes to ingested toxins, and changes to furniture, home/office design, footwear etc. that will virtually eliminate modern malnutrition, toxic exposure and chronic musculo-skeletal distress. Let’s not wait, as we’re doing now with global warming, for the impossible scientific certainty that our food system, pollution and our modern lifestyle are killing us. And then, once we’ve rectified these three health scourges, let’s celebrate the next generation’s astonishing health and well-being. Let’s trust our instincts and act now. I know, that’s hopelessly idealistic and naive, and we’re not going to do it. But what if:
Wouldn’t the rest of the population then overcome their learned helplessness and demand the same right to health and wellness as these model communities? That’s the kind of collective self-experimentation we need, I guess, to know with enough certainty the cause of and cure for our modern epidemics, and to do what we must to end them. The Stress Factor I referred in my Saturday links post to a lecture by Robert Sapolsky on why some people handle stress so much better than others. In summary, he said:
In a previous article I indicated that, largely unconsciously, I have changed in ten important ways: (1) Paying more attention to, and taking much better care of, my body, (2) Having more fun, (3) Caring more about other people, (4) Letting go faster, (5) Being more physically affectionate, (6) downshifting my career and other ambitions, (7) Pursuing new, down-to-earth hobbies, (8) Going slower, (9) Being less anxious, and (10) Enjoying the passage of time. I am not sure how I am doing these things, since when in past I have consciously tried to do these things I have failed — it just wasn’t in my nature. My sense is that my body is now in control (the neural complexity and neural processing throughput of the digestive system, the body’s ’second brain’, is comparable to that of the ‘first brain’), having ‘decided’ that my mind was doing a poor job and needed to be relieved of its duty. Simply put, it (my body) did what it had to, to get me back in balance and well, and is continuing to do so. These ten changes map well to Sapolsky’s identified ‘excellent stress management’ traits (my groupings and terminology): Perspective: (a) and (c) optimism, dispassionate assessment, and not overreacting – maps to (4) letting go faster, (9) being less anxious and (10) enjoying the passage of time;
Let-Self-Changeability: (b) exercising self-control/adaptability/resilience – maps to (1) listening to and taking care of my body, (4) letting go faster, (6) downshifting my career and other ambitions, (8) going slower, and (9) being less anxious; Outlets to Discharge Stress (including sociality): (d) and (f) finding and employing outlets that discharge stress – maps to (2) having more fun, (3) caring more about other people, (5) being more physically affectionate and (7) pursuing new, down-to-earth hobbies; Perspective, let-self-changeability and outlets to discharge stress aren’t, however, enough to help us cope in situations where the cause or source of the stress is something over which we have (or believe we have) no control (e.g. an asshole employer), or where the stress is caused by unpredictable situations and unexpected surprises (e.g. natural disasters). You don’t have to look far to see situations where even people with excellent stress management ability have been devastated by stress caused by either uncontrollable or unpredictable circumstances. There is therefore an all-too-human propensity (perhaps, as I argued recently, pathological in the case of conservatives) to try to impose control by force, to try to make the uncontrollable controllable. Indigenous cultures know better, but our modern imperialist culture has yet to learn this important lesson. The very fact that we think it might be possible — to control and predict nature absolutely, to exterminate all diseases, to make our body strong enough to be ‘immune’ to stress instead of making it resilient to cope with it — can actually exacerbate the consequences of the stress when this foolish and futile attempt to control it fails. So perhaps we should add a fourth category of stress management traits to Sapolsky’s list: Acceptance: the wisdom to appreciate that complex systems are inherently uncontrollable and unpredictable, not try to impose control or predictability on them, and not to worry about things over which one has no control.
Hugh Brody’s story about getting caught in a terrible blizzard with two old Inuit hunters, and then having their food supply suddenly destroyed, is a compelling example of this. While Brody went into panic and fury over this situation, his Inuit colleagues were calm even when they were near death from starvation, because they knew (intuitively, rationally, emotionally, culturally) that stress reactions would only make the situation worse. They just accepted with complete equanimity that what would happen would happen, that it was beyond their control. That acceptance might well have saved their, and Brody’s, life. One could argue that a lifetime is not nearly long enough to engender this capacity for acceptance, and overcome one’s lifelong cultural indoctrination. My response: We do what we must, and if we must acquire this capacity, to cope with stress that will otherwise kill us, we will. Maybe in time, maybe not. And probably unconsciously, with our bodies, not our minds, telling us how. I’m getting there, I think. I wish I hadstarted a lifetime ago. |
August 28, 2006
Getting Things Done (GTD): Just Say No to Urgent Unimportant Tasks
 It’s been awhile since I posted anything controversial on this blog. This might make up for that. I suspect to hear some “it’s not that easy” protestations. I’m ready for them — I’ve walked the talk on this.You’re probably familiar with Covey’s urgent/important quadrants, shown in the graphic at right. Covey’s thesis is that we spend so much time on quadrant 3 matters (urgent but unimportant) that some quadrant 1 matters (urgent and important) may get neglected (since often they’re onerous and time-consuming), and most quadrant 2 matters (important but not urgent) get pushed down the priority list and never get done at all (until/unless they become urgent quadrant 1 matters, which quite often happens too late, like on our deathbeds). One of the things I’ve done with my GTD list (see model below) to try to address this tendency, is to flag urgent items on my list in italics, and important items in bold (and quadrant 1 items in bold italics), and pledge to do at least one important (quadrant 1 or 2) ‘next action step’ every day. Dave’s Getting Things Done process and list format
The problem was, despite my best intentions, the urgent stuff kept getting moved up and the important stuff moved down. At the end of every day I was deleting completed tasks in italics, adding new urgent tasks, and, with a sigh, rescheduling tasks in bold to later dates. Since my stress-induced disease hit me and woke me up, I’m not doing that any more. In fact, I’ve declared war on quadrant 3 (and 4) tasks: They don’t get put on the list at all. Every action on my (much shorter) GTD list is now bold quadrant 1 or 2 tasks. Most of the quadrant 3 tasks, it turned out, fell into one of these categories:
Impossible not to do these things, you say? I thought so too, until I realized the stress of dealing with ‘urgent’ tasks, and the disappointment of not getting to important (to me) ones, were making me miserable, and ultimately ill. How did I get rid of the urgent unimportant tasks? It was a three-step process:
As an example of step 3: A couple of weeks ago, we hosted the annual neighbourhood barbecue (which has actually evolved into a day-long series of events that take quite a bit of planning and preparation). In past years, the two preceding days have been, for me and my wife, an exhausting flurry of activities, where everything else gets deferred to make sure we’re ready. And sometimes we don’t get as much chance to socialize with the neighbours as we’d like during the event, because we’re constantly dealing with urgent little matters (e.g. “we forgot to get mayo for the burgers, could you run to the store?”) This year, because of my health, I had to scale back my ambitions. I cleaned and resurfaced our barbecue deck, because I wanted to learn how to do it and because it needed to be done desperately (i.e. quadrant 1). But many of the things that I urgently wanted to do but which weren’t that important I knew weren’t going to get done. I prepared my excuses for not having weeded the lawn, not having repainted the patio furniture etc. But then something amazing happened. Starting the day before the event, neighbours started calling up and asking if there was anything they could do. And instead of the usual stoic “no that’s fine, we’ve got it under control” we said “OK that’s very kind of you”. One neighbour who loves to paint and prides herself on her skill at it repainted 16 plastic patio chairs and tables. She loved doing it, did it brilliantly, and eliminated that quadrant 3 task from our list. Another neighbour came over with floral arrangements for all the tables. Another cleaned our pool. Another, who fancies himself an oenophile, picked out and delivered all the wine for the event. Other neighbours donated lovely hand-made prizes for the annual charity raffle that follows our dinner, reducing the cost of the prizes and allowing us to donate more to the local community charity. This was all spontaneous stuff, turning what would have been stressful chores for us into joyful activities that made the whole event better and more collaborative. All we had to do was ‘let go’ of the responsibility for these quadrant 3 tasks, and others who actually like doing these tasks self-delegated to do them for us. The only cost was a few genuine and appreciated “Thank You’s”. A next-door neighbour went home and retrieved some mayo. During the actual events, like Goofy Golf, we participated more fully than ever before. We had as much time for socializing as our guests. Everything went flawlessly. We partied until 2am and were so relaxed we could have gone on longer. This may be an exceptional example, but it makes the point: What’s an unimportant, distracting chore to you can be something important, satisfying, even joyful to someone else. Let go, stop being a control freak about your responsibilities and you may be amazed how much others will willingly, even enthusiastically take off your plate, while creating no obligation to you to ‘return the favour’. It’s human nature to enjoy helping other people we like. Why is it so hard for us to let them do so? The first and second steps are harder, but they get easier with practice. Some people are naturals at doing these things, and studying them as ‘role models’ can help you learn how to do these steps quite gracefully, until they become ’second nature’, and can show you how to ‘get away with them’ without adverse consequences. One of my mantras lately has been: We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun. Getting rid of the quadrant 3 tasks is a means of reducing the number of things you ‘must’ do, freeing up and making time for what’s easy and fun (most stuff that is really important to us tends also to be fun). So by this simple process, just by human nature you end up spending more of your time doing things that are important and joyful. Besides, you tend to do a better job at things you think are important. And the few urgent things you can’t avoid become less stressful and overwhelming, so you have more time to do them and you do a better job at them too. The upshot of all this is that my GTD lists have become so much shorter, quickly crossed off, and easy to memorize (you don’t forget stuff that’s important to you) that I no longer refer to them daily, but weekly. I’m getting a lot more done with less work and less stress. I’m enjoying what I do every day. I’m making progress on things I’ve been putting off for a decade. I have the time and perspective to think things through more rationally, emotionally and intuitively, so I’m making better decisions. My ‘personal productivity’ has soared. My apologies if this all comes across as a bit evangelical. I’m just kicking myself for not realizing it before. Why does it so often take a crisis, a kick in the head, to wake us up to some simple changes that can transform our lives, and make us so much happier and fulfilled? I’m beginning tothink I’m not the only ’slow learner’ out there. |
August 27, 2006
Social Networking: Why are Conversation and Collaboration Tools so Underused?
 You’ve seen it a million times: At a meeting with a dozen people, some of them take notes and others don’t, and if you have a chance to see the notes afterwards you wonder if the people were actually at the same meeting. The people connected in by phone or online were even more clued out, somehow missing everything important that came out of the meeting. And a month later, the minutes of the meeting come out, and you read them and ask yourself: When during the meeting did we agree to do that?
One of the purposes of the new flood of social networking tools is to try to organize, facilitate and improve the effectiveness of conversations and collaborative activities. The power and promise of these tools was and is considerable, and a year ago Steve Barth even predicted the demise of group e-mails (in favour of next-gen wikis and other more dynamic tools). But most of these tools remain underused, or hardly used at all. The following table is my rough take on current usage of these tools:
What’s happening here? I think there are seven main reasons for this underutilization:
In many cases the cost of limiting our conversations and collaborations to the 20% or 2% of people who can effectively use these tools is just too high, so we revert to the lowest-common-denominator tools in the left column above. But the consequence of this is suboptimal conversations and collaborations: A lot of wasted time, high travel cost, a great deal of miscommunication and non-communication, misunderstandings about what has been learned and decided, great ideas and important information not heard or not used, learnings and information lost or forgotten, and collaborations dominated by the loudest or most powerful instead of drawing on the best from all participants. Many people seem to believe the answer is to make the tools better and wait for the rest of the world (or the next generation) to catch up with the 2% or 20%. But I’m not so sure. The digital divide seems to grow ever wider, not narrower, and if a tool as simple, free and intuitive as Skype can’t replace the telephone even for tech-savvy users, what hope is there for more complicated, sophisticated tools? And while better education and training in conversational and collaboration skills, and in the use of enabling tools, would certainly help, my guess is that we’re too busy, or don’t consider it urgent or important enough, to make acquiring these skills and tool familiarity a priority, so it just ain’t going to happen. A generation from now someone will write an article very much like this one, and nothing will have changed. So let’s try an experiment in online collaboration, using Google Writely, one of the right-column tools, and see if we can come up, through conversation and collaboration, with some better answers, or at least an understanding of why social networking tools aren’t going to change the world. You can find a copy of this article on Google Writely here. If you want to participate in this conversation and collaboration, here’s what to do:
As long as it isn’t a dog’s breakfast, once everyone has had their say, I will replace this version with the collaborative Writely version here on the blog. If it turns out really well, I may make this standard procedure on many of my blog posts. Time for your say:
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August 26, 2006
Links for the Week — August 26, 2006
 A bumper crop of interesting links this week — thanks mainly to my generous and well-read readers and the fact that I’m finally starting to get caught up on four months of backlogged e-mails: Environment and Energy: Buying Green: Green Home offers well-researched, environmentally-friendly (but alas, definitely not cheap) products for your home. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link. Outsourcing Pollution: Andrew Leonard in Salon’s wonderful HTWW debunks the myth that once a nation becomes affluent it cleans up its environmental act — explaining that it’s cheaper to export the pollution to poorer nations. Alliance for Better Food and Farming: A cornucopia of information from the UK on efforts to find a better way than toxic chemical- and additive-soaked over-processed food, unsustainable agriculture, GM frankenfoods and horrific factory farming. The Definitive Argument Against Nuclear Power ‘Solving’ the End of Oil: The always-wonderful Irish sustainability site Feasta has it. Thanks to Scruff for the link. Why to Live a Radically Simple Lifestyle: Ten reasons to live well within your means, housing-wise. And an explanation of the spiritual significance of Ted Trainer’s The Simpler Way of living. Thanks to David Parkinson for these links, and for the one that follows. A Pattern Map of a Sustainable Economy: David Parkinson explains Christopher Alexander’s intriguing map: (reproduced above) “High on the gee-whiz scale. I hope that Alexander is enjoying his late-career lionization (albeit everywhere except in his main field of work, architecture, where he seems to be considered a seditious and dangerous figure). I can’t pick up a book lately about house design without seeing him cited (oddly, these books also heavily cite Le Corbusier, who is Alexander’s preferred whipping boy for the excesses of modernism). And here the idea of a collection of loosely related ‘patterns’ is being applied to sustainable society. Something in his metaphor or presentation (or optimism) seems to really inspire people trying to map out unknown territory… maybe the appeal is in the methodology, which is sloppily bottom-up & inductive, with taxonomies that emerge slowly by the accretion of specific cases, then congeal into more-or-less fixed systems over time.” The NYT Groks Intentional Communities: Andrew Jacobs explains how 1960s-era communes have evolved into model intentional communities, and what this means for our future. Thanks to Dave Davison for the link. Business and Complexity: Measuring Results by Telling Stories: An interesting approach to results determination that embraces complexity is the Most Significant Change approach, which consciously percolates success and war stories up from the bottom to decision-makers. Lots more interesting stuff on this site too, which I’m adding to my business blogroll. Love the list of 8 Ways to Avoid Complexity. If you want to try out MSC, sign up here. The Universe Keeps Getting Stranger: An interesting NYT article on new learnings about dark matter, and what we still don’t know about dark energy. Doctors Try Self-Experimentation: The London Times reports that even the medical profession is learning that when it comes to complex systems like the human body, we’re each a unique sample of one. Thanks to Seth Roberts’ self-experimentation forum for the links (you’ll also find my self-experimentation progress reports there). How to Make a Decision Like a Tribe: Indigenous Wisdom about decision-making in complex situations, an old but still timely article from Fast Company, via Mike Bell. Another Book and Approach to Creating Your Own Enterprise: Pamela Slim is writing a book on how to start your own business. It’s a lot more orthodox in approach than my book The Natural Enterprise, and I don’t agree with everything she says, but we need all the books and help we can get on this subject, so brava Pamela. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link. Robert Sapolsky Explains Why Some People Handle Stress Better Than Others: A fascinating, 80-minute-long lecture merges research on how brain cells are killed by stress with research on wild primate behaviour. Bottom line:
Fascinating stuff, which, for obvious personal reasons, I’ll have more to say about later this week. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link. Technology: Creating and Sharing Presentations & Graphics Online: Gliffy looks pretty cool. Thanks to Emanuel Sidea for the link. Using Mindmapping as a Compositional Aid: A documentary filmmaker uses mindmapping software to craft a film about, ironically, the lack of innovation and creativity in the commercial music industry. Thanks to Innovation Weekly for the link. Just for Fun: Bulwer-Lytton 2006 Contest Winners: For worst first sentence in a novel in different genres. Absolutely hilarious. Thanks to Carroll McNeill for the link. |
August 25, 2006
Night walk, Light walk
 Wednesday night it rained, and, since I was, as usual of late, unable to sleep, I decided to go for a 1 a.m. walk as the rain tapered off to a light shower. Our house is built into the side of a hill (great for energy conservation), and as I walked down the steps to the driveway, the front gardens (my wife’s pride and joy) were glistening with moisture in the light of the coach-lamps. The light in every place, at every different season, at each time of day, in every different kind of weather, is unique. Sunsets, for example, or the hue of the sky after a thunderstorm, in England, where I was born, in the Prairies, where I grew up, on the Pacific Coast, in Paris, in Amsterdam, in Guyana, and in Sydney, each have completely different light spectra, palpably different. You could knock me unconscious, take me to one of these places, to a nondescript area with no distinguishing landmarks, and block all of my senses except sight, and I could tell you which place it was simply by the light. I think other animals appreciate this intuitively. They don’t need GPS to navigate their way when they migrate huge distances — they somehow know it just by the light. When Eliot wrote Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium I think he was describing how the light ‘recalls’ other times in this precise place, at this time, at this season, in this kind of weather. This unique and particular juxtaposition of light is what defines place for us. We recognize it, or do not and take in its novelty, its strangeness, and subconsciously catalogue it so when next we see this same, precise light we will know it. We will say I know this place. And place is so important to us, poor wretched nomadic ever-searching creatures that we have become! This extraordinary capacity to nuance the result of millions of photons striking our neurons and firing along the synapses to our brain in a unique and recognizable way is what tells us the way home (the place to which we belong), and then tells us we are home. The Latin word lumen means at once light and open space — place. The words illuminate and enlighten denote light but connote knowing. In the dark, when our rod cell receptors take over the heavy duty from the cone cell receptors, we appreciate (= make grow) the light, and the spaces and places it reveals and defines, better than we do in the extravagant light of day. All we need to do, to find our way to any place, is follow the light. Were it so easy to find the people we were meant to be with! So I walked up the driveway and started around the block. I was smiling like a fool, intoxicated by the lights, by these special and unique places, by my recognizing them, knowing them. I am told that mesalamine, the anti-inflammatory drug I am taking, causes what is called “light sensitivity”, and I wondered if I was high on light. It was a delightful feeling. Every light I saw — streetlight, coachlight, porchlight, solar walkway light, incandescent and fluorescent lights from the windows of the houses I passed — was beckoning to me, inviting me to recognize it, know it, differentiate it from all other lights. I stopped and took photographs, but what the camera captured was not even a shadow what I saw. I wondered if this new awareness of light and shadow was another manifestation of my (largely unconscious) Let-Self-Change process, or just a transient side-effect of the drugs I am taking. Whatever its cause, I was (and am often, these days) euphoric (did you know the literal meaning of that word is healthy? — when we aren’t in a naturally euphoric state it means we’re unhealthy). I was connecting, in a profound and emotional way, with the lights I passed, stopping at each one. Each light was telling me the story of its place. It was as if I could feel the photons hitting my eyes, my face, my body. I suddenly recalled this passage from Sam Phillips’ song: Give up the ground under your feet
Hold on to nothing for good Turn and run at the mean times chasing you Stand alone and misunderstood And now that I’ve worn out, I’ve worn out the world I’m on my knees in fascination Looking through the night And the moon’s never seen me before But I’m reflecting light And I started singing that mournful, wistful song. And all alone, in the darkness, in the light, I was laughing, and dancing (the song is awaltz). And I was beaming. |
August 24, 2006
Conflicting Pleasures: Intense vs Sustained, Distilled vs Contextualized
 Happiness and pleasure, it seems, come in two flavours. There’s the intense, short-term, euphoric, non-enduring type — dopamine and adrenaline coursing through our veins, producing brief moments of ecstasy. And then there’s the enduring, mellow, less acute type — perhaps linked more to endorphins, fatigue, aesthetic response. The former is distilled, instant gratification; the latter takes time and requires an appreciation of context before it can be delivered, but it lasts, and its impact on us lasts longer, too. In our modern attention-deficit society, the pendulum has swung towards the former. You see it in what we watch, what we read, what we do — we’re willing to sacrifice understanding and sustainability for the quick fix of immediate, acute, escapist pleasure. We would be healthier, and happier, I would argue, if we could strike a better balance between the two, both of which have a place and a value in our lives:
The first group of pleasures, the intense, distilled ones, are wow! experiences, with an exclamation mark. The second, the sustained, contextualized ones, are mmmmm… experiences, with an ellipsis, extending them quietly and indefinitely out. We need them both. We get too little of both. We too often try to make a surfeit of wow! experiences substitute for an inadequacy of mmmmm… experiences. It’s part of the tragedy of undervaluing our time, and squandering it on the urgent instead of the important. As a consequences of the dramatic Let-Self-Change process I’m going through, I’m taking the time, making the time, for more pleasures of both flavours, but especially the latter, the enduring pleasures that change us, make us more profoundly happy and human. But for those who prefer their pleasures intense and distilled, here’s a challenge to go along with my earlier ‘greatest passages’ challenge: What movie moment, lasting no more than two minutes, affected you the most, in each of the following categories:
This is kind of cheating, I know: Some of these sensational cinematic moments, taken out of the context of the entire film, become quite shallow and meaningless. If you doubt this, try to recall seeing the dramatic highlights of films you haven’t seen on movie award shows — you probably wondered what all the buzz was about. To get you started, here are one or two of my nominations for each category:
These are, of course, films with both wow! and mmmmm… pleasures for the viewer. There is such joy in these brief and extraordinary moments of celluloid! Why, in the last two decades, have cinematic moments of such brilliance and beauty been so few and far between? |
August 23, 2006
Why Local Sustainable Enterprises are at Competitive Disadvantage, and What to Do About It
 Michael Shuman, one of the co-founders of BALLE, has written an excellent book diagnosing the reasons entrepreneurial businesses face an uneven playing field and an unfair competitive disadvantage versus the multinational corporatist oligopolies (MCOs). This book, The Small-Mart Revolution, also prescribes 95 ways we can help rectify this damaging distortion of the ‘market’ economy — as customers, investors, public policy-setters, community members, citizens, and entrepreneurs ourselves.
Shuman introduces a useful acronym to differentiate the types of entrepreneurial business we need to encourage and support: LOIS (local ownership & import substitution). Only when owners live and work in the communities they operate in do they really care about the people and environment in those communities, he argues. And only by replacing shoddy products and services transported half way around the globe (at enormous social and environmental cost) with goods and services produced right in the community can we hope to build strong, healthy and resilient local economies where people can both live and make a reasonable living. The first part of the book outlines the 13 market distortions that multinational corporatist oligopolies (MCOs) have been able to create and exploit to enormous advantage, to the great detriment of entrepreneurs who actually add value to the communities in which they operate — and offer customers much greater value for their dollar:
If these distortions could be overcome, Shuman argues, we have a lot to gain from an economy in which LOIS enterprises compete fairly and effectively with MCOs:
The balance of the book prescribes the 95 actions we can take to remedy the market distortions:
There are two disturbing and enduring myths about entrepreneurship:
Shuman tackles the first misconception well, but sidesteps the second. One of the most frustrating experiences of enlightened customers is to go into locally-owned retailers and discover everything on the shelves is imported (mostly from China) when good local sources of similar goods are available (just invisible). Or to hire a local service provider only to discover that they buy all their supplies from a wholesaler’s catalogue, most of which is imported products that by-pass local producers. But we have to start somewhere, and this book provides a good blueprint on how to do so. What will be even more essential than a grassroots buy local movement will be entrepreneurs and local activists researching, cataloguing and creating networks of LOIS enterprises, and acting as organizers and intermediaries to help customers in local communities become aware of, and arrange to buy from, LOIS enterprises. Just as important will be encouraging and coaching new LOIS enterprises to get properly and sustainably established, and helping them appreciate (and explain to their customers) the benefits and value of buying the goods on their shelves, the service that support them, and replacement and supply parts and accessories, from local suppliers. This book is the perfect antidote and response to the corporatist apologists’ argument that “no one is forcing you to buy from Wal-Mart”. It’s time for responsible, enlightened LOIS entrepreneurs to break ranks with the corporatists in chambers of commerce, the anti-Kyoto forces, and the cynical ‘deregulation’ lobby, and realize that MCOs are not their allies but their worst enemy. The Small-Mart Revolution islong overdue, and needs our support and collaboration to make it happen. Logo above is from the Bay Area Green Business Program. |
